The Sky That Sings Without Words

King David was awake before the sun,
watching the sky over the hills of Jerusalem.
The stars went out one by one,
the hills turned from black to gray,
and then the sun came up over them, blazing.
(Kings do not have to get up early. This one liked to.)

With a harp in his lap,
he sang about what the sky had been telling him all along.

"The heavens are telling how glorious God is!
The sky shows off the work of his hands.
Each day tells it to the next day.
Each night tells it to the next night,
and it never stops."

Yet the sky never says one word,
and no one hears its voice.
Still its message goes out to the ends of the earth,
to every family in every language.

Then David sang about the sun.
"God pitched a tent for it in the sky.
It comes out each morning
like a bridegroom bursting out of his room on his wedding day,
like a strong runner who can't wait for the race to start.
It runs from one edge of the sky to the other,
and nothing can hide from its heat."

(On a summer afternoon in Israel,
even the lizards go looking for shade.)

Then David looked down at the scroll in his hands.
The sky could show that God was great.
It could not tell anyone how to live.
For that, God had given his people words,
spoken to Moses on the mountain.

"The law of the LORD is perfect," David sang.
"It brings a tired heart back to life.
What God says can be trusted,
and it makes a simple person wise.
His commands are right,
and they make the heart glad.
They are worth more than a heap of gold,
and sweeter than honey
dripping straight from the comb!"

But God's words were so clean and bright
that David began to see himself in them,
like a face in a bucket of water.
Some of what he saw, he did not like.

"Who can find all his own mistakes?" he asked.
"LORD, wash away the wrongs that hide where I can't see them.
Hold me back from the proud wrongs I choose on purpose.
Don't let them rule over me."

And he closed his song with a prayer:
"Let the words of my mouth
and the thoughts of my heart
make you glad, LORD,
my Rock and my Redeemer."

(In those days a redeemer was the relative
who paid whatever it cost
to buy back a relative who had been sold as a slave.)

But the sky could only shine without words,
and the scroll could only say what was right.
Neither could reach inside David
and wash out the wrongs hiding there.
So David waited for the day his Redeemer would pay that cost himself,
and his children's children waited,
while the sun ran its race across the sky
hundreds of thousands of times.

Then God spoke one more Word,
and this Word had a face.
"The Word became a man and lived among us,"
one of his friends wrote.
He walked under David's sky
and spoke God's words to hungry crowds.
He carried everyone's wrongs to a cross,
the hidden ones and the proud ones too,
paid what it cost, and died there.

On the third day,
when the women reached his tomb,
the sun was coming up like a bridegroom on his wedding morning,
and Jesus was already alive.